Helen Purchase, Ignaz Rutter
This is the arXiv index for the electronic proceedings of GD 2021, which contains the peer-reviewed and revised accepted papers with an optional appendix. Proceedings (without appendices) are also to be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
Thomas Leibfried, Tamara Mchedlidze, Nico Meyer-Hübner et al.
Future power grids will offer enhanced controllability due to the increased availability of power flow control units (FACTS). As the installation of control units in the grid is an expensive investment, we are interested in using few controllers to achieve high controllability. In particular, two questions arise: How many flow control buses are necessary to obtain globally optimal power flows? And if fewer flow control buses are available, what can we achieve with them? Using steady state IEEE benchmark data sets, we explore experimentally that already a small number of controllers placed at certain grid buses suffices to achieve globally optimal power flows. We present a graph-theoretic explanation for this behavior. To answer the second question we perform a set of experiments that explore the existence and costs of feasible power flow solutions at increased loads with respect to the number of flow control buses in the grid. We observe that adding a small number of flow control buses reduces the flow costs and extends the existence of feasible solutions at increased load.